We recently enjoyed a lively discussion with Twitter guru and social media expert, Ryan Holmes. A native Canadian, Holmes is the founder of Invoke Media and more specifically, Hootsuite.com, the proverbial Chuck Norris of Twitter clients as described in our recent article: If Twitter Clients Were Action Stars. Apart from social media, Holmes is an established entrepreneur and has been involved in the business world since high school. But it’s Holmes’ involvement in the social media sector that makes him an invaluable resource for anyone looking to expand their social web presence.
Flowtown: What is Invoke and why did you start it?
Ryan: Well, Invoke is a services agency I founded in 2000. Basically, through the evolution of the Internet, we started building websites. I was working for a dot-com in 1999-2000 and the dot-com bombed at the end. But I was really keen on the web, doing design and development, project management and a little programming and just wanted to keep doing this work. So I founded invoke doing services work, website development, application development, and later on doing internet marketing. And that’s what I have been doing from the end of 2000 to present day.
Flowtown: You were involved in some entrepreneurial ventures before you entered the social media world. What were those ventures and how did they prepare you for the work you do now?
Ryan: I started my first business when I was 16. It was a paintball company and I did that for a number of years in high school and post high school. It was a really great business to learn more about business marketing and management, you know, all the things you need to be successful.
My second business was a restaurant. I founded a pizza company and did that for two years in conjunction with the paintball company. I had aspirations to franchise that, and I did one franchise of it, but the web was calling for me. I was always interested in computers, so I decided to sell that business. At that point I moved to Vancouver where I started doing an online business for the paintball company. That’s where I also started the dot-com work and then founded Invoke.
Flowtown: And where were you before Vancouver?
Ryan: I was in the Okanagans, basically the Napa Valley of Vancouver. So, I was eventually able to do both Invoke and the online company. My brother was managing the brick and mortar retail store and warehousing, and we managed to grow that business up quite a bit. It’s one of the biggest paint ball companies in Canada now and we do quite a bit of sales through it. I’m not really involved in the day to day with that, I’m an advisor and director for it. Now I’m primarily focused on Hootsuite which we spun out of Invoke in January of this year.
Flowtown: Tell us a bit about Hootsuite and why it’s such a powerful Twitter tool for businesses and individuals.
Ryan: We are a tool for a whole spectrum of users. It is a tool for power users or people that just want to get more out of Twitter and social media. Our users are small/medium enterprise users and casual Twitter users. But where we’re focused on adding a lot of value is for small/medium enterprise teams, etc. using Twitter so that they can get more out of Twitter and their social media presence. We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies using us, a lot of great brands, influencers and power users, etc. that are working with the product and seeing value from it. So all we’re focused on is building the best tools for them.
Flowtown: What are the most interesting ways in which companies are currently utilizing Hootsuite?
Ryan: Well, you know it is a broad range. I think some people are doing kind of cool and interesting stuff with the scheduling. One person scheduled an opera with it – kind of a Twitter story opera thing they were doing. We’ve seen just a whole range of different applications with it. The analytics is really great to learn more about what you’re doing. We recently incorporated URL keyword tagging and you can basically append Google and Omniture analytics tags so you can see from the links you put out what kind of ROI they give you. If you have goals and filters set up you are able to see conversion to ROI, lead gen, or e-commerce transactions, etc. so you can start to gauge how well your social media campaign is performing.
Flowtown: What are some of the more creative ways you are marketing Hootsuite.
Ryan: We rely heavily on viral growth and users advocating on our behalf. As I see it, our goal is to give people tools to help promote us and help talk about us. We basically crowd-source our marketing in some ways, so that’s kind of our strategy, how we can best enable people. And really our goal is to push the snowball off the edge of the cliff and start the avalanche. We are a small and nimble team and we’re only going to be able to get so much voice. So we just look at how we can best leverage this and give our users tools to create content that is viral, like you guys are doing. That’s kind of the way that we look at it.
Flowtown: Hootsuite aside, what other Invoke products are you most excited about?
Ryan: You know, I’m not super involved with Invoke on a day-to-day basis. But, I love our video product; it’s called Memelabs. It’s a video-contesting tool for brands. We’re doing some really cool campaigns with that. We just did a Ben and Jerry’s campaign and have a couple other really cool campaigns coming up. So, it has really captured a lot of imagination of companies and we’re excited about that. We’re also working on the social media campaign that Invoke has been doing and I’m really amazed and happy with some of the results they’re getting. They’re killing it on a lot of fronts.
Flowtown: In the next five years how do you see social media changing the way in which companies and individuals interact with each other and how can we prepare for those changes?
Ryan: Well, that’s a big long window into the future. But I think we’re seeing what’s kind of happening with the threading together of online and offline through mobile. I think that’s a really cool and exciting piece that’s happening right now and we’re just on the cusp of it.
Before the iPhone, the mobile experience was a piece of crap, right? But now there are actually good data phones starting to emerge. I predict that in two years you won’t be able to get a phone that isn’t a data phone. The telephone companies want to sell more data, and the only way they’re going to push more data through if they give peoplel data phones, so it’s in their best interest to do that. I think we’ll see the death of the dumb phone coming up and because of that there’s so many interesting innovations that will happen in this space as people look to see what they can do with these properties. So, I’m pretty excited about that.
With social media we’re seeing the threading together of geo and social, you know, with Foursquare and Gowalla, and I think that’s a really interesting evolution. The data behind that will be fascinating as we’re really gonna see what people are doing, where they’re going and what’s trending in a real-time way. Marketers are going to need to figure out how to converse with this.
Traditional advertising is dead, and I think looking at how advertising is evolving through Twitter is pretty cool. They’re creating a new genre or category of advertising. They’re creating a new breed and I think that’s a really smart move on their part. If they were just releasing CPC advertising it’s kind of like comparing apples to apples where all they’ll do is get into a commodity market for advertising. But if they create a new breed, it’s apples to oranges. They’re going to thread retweets and other factors into it, so I think that’ll be very interesting to see what kind of ROI advertisers will get out of their advertisers.
Follow Ryan on Twitter, or sign up for Hootsuite to learn more.
